“You mentioned a director? Stein? Does he run the entire operation?”

“You mean the entire facility?”

“Yes.”

“More or less. He sets overall policy and whatnot. But the day-to-day operations in the West Tower are handled by his deputy.”

MacAllister was surprised there were so many people. “I understood Origins wouldn’t become operational for years.”

“Fully operational. We’ve been up and running for eighteen months. We don’t have anything like the capacity the system will have when it’s completely put together. But it’s still far and away the world’s best collider.

“It takes a lot of people to make this place go, Mac. It’s okay if I call you that? Good. About a third of them are engineering and construction types. Another third do technical support and administration. You know, supply, general maintenance, life support, and so on. The rest are scientific staff. The researchers. They rotate. They come on board in groups by project. And they compete for instrument time from the first day they get here.”

“What would they be doing on the instruments?” asked Amy, who couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

MacAllister thought about her father trying to send her to law school and couldn’t suppress a smile.

“They’ll want one more run on the beam, or more time on the computers, or a little more bandwidth on the comm channels. We can’t possibly keep everybody happy.”

MacAllister was still thinking about DiLorenzo. “Is the place safe?” he asked.

“Absolutely. You couldn’t be in a safer place.”

“You’re not going to blow up this part of the galaxy?”

“I’ve heard those stories, too. I wouldn’t take them too seriously, Mac.” Lou allowed himself a polite smile. Didn’t want to offend anybody, but it was a dumb question.

Lou did a lot of introductions, including some to people whose names he had trouble remembering. Hardly any of them recognized MacAllister’s name.

He wasn’t used to people smiling, shaking hands, and turning away.

WHEN THEY’D FINISHED, Lou announced it was show-time, and led the way out into a corridor. “If you’ll allow me,” he said, “I’d like you to see what we’re about.”

They crossed into a dark room, and the lights came on.

It was a circular VR chamber. They took seats around the wall, and Lou brought up an image of a long narrow line, which stretched wire-thin from one side of the chamber to the other. “This is our basic structure as it is now constituted,” he said. “The East Terminal is on your right; the West to the left. Between, of course, is the tube.” He put up a silhouette of North America, and laid it over the line. Origins extended from Savannah, Georgia, to Los Angeles and out into the Pacific almost to the Hawaiian Islands.

“All one structure?” said Amy.

“All one. When it’s finished, it will be considerably larger.” The line lifted off the map. Hawaii and the Pacific and the NAU shrank and were seen to be on a curved surface. Then the Earth was dropping away. The line extended off-world, well past the moon.

And finally stopped.

“I know the wire’s thin,” said MacAllister, “but that’s still a lot of the stuff. Where’s it come from?”

“We mine it. Iron asteroids in the Ophiuchi system. We do everything over there, extract it, smelt it, whatever, put it on spools, and bring the spools here.”

“It’s enormous,” said Eric. “I don’t think I ever realized how big this place is. How big it will be.”

“In fact,” said Lou, “the collider, when it’s finished, will be too short.”

MacAllister stared at the line projecting out past the moon. “You’re not serious.”

“Oh, yes. Eventually we’ll have to build another one. When we have the resources.”

“And when you know more,” said MacAllister.

“That, too.”

The image rotated and gave them a close-up of the East Tower. “Accelerator beams are generated here,” he said. “And at the other end, of course.” The sphere opened up, and they were inside, looking at a round, polished disk. Lou launched into a standard lecture. Here was how the beam was aimed, here’s what the robots did, there’s how they kept even a few stray particles from getting into the tube.

MacAllister started getting bored. “Lou,” he said, breaking in, “what’s it for? What do you expect to learn?”

Lou inhaled. Looked simultaneously proud and cornered. “The easy answer,” he said, “is that we will be collecting accurate data that can’t be had any other way. The true reason, though, the one that gets to the heart of things, is that we don’t know what we might learn. Won’t know until we see it. It’s fair to say we’re looking for ultimate answers. Why is there a universe instead of nothing? Are there other universes? You might even say we’re looking for the right questions to ask.”

“Such as?”

He fumbled that one. “Nobody else would want to be quoted saying this, but there are a lot of people here who think the same way I do about this.” He paused. “It would be nice to know whether our existence has any meaning beyond the moment.”

That was a bit too spiritual for MacAllister. The taxpayers were spending enormous sums so Lou Cassel and his crowd could look for answers to questions that, by their nature, had no answers.

Lou finished finally, and the lights came on. “If you like,” he said, “we can walk over and take a look at the generators.”

But Valya had her link clasped to her ear. When she’d finished, MacAllister moved next to her. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Bill. The probe we left at Ophiuchi — ”

“Yes?”

“Has reported moonriders.”

Origins isn’t about physics. It’s not even mostly about physics, or anthropology, or art, or history. Or, God help us, engineering. It’s about bigger issues. It’s about faith as opposed to religion. Understanding rather than belief. The project will be a place where we are invited to ask any question. The only requirement will be a willingness to accept the answer. Even though we may not like it.

We can create the appearance of knowledge, the illusion of knowing how to grapple with a problem. Far too many educational systems have done exactly that. The result is generations of mouthpieces who can pour forth approved responses to programmed stimuli that contribute nothing to rational discussion. Dogma is for those who wish only to be comfortable. Catechisms are for cowards; commandments, for control freaks who have so little respect for their species that they are driven to appeal to a higher power to keep everyone in line.

If indeed we have a Maker, I suspect He is proudest of us when we ask the hard questions. And listen for the answers.

— Filippo Montreone, commenting on the proposal to build the hypercollider, 2193

We’re not enamored of truth. It is too often painful, discouraging, and it tends to undermine our self-image. We prefer comfort. Reassurance. Well-being. Good cheer. Naked optimism. Nobody wants to hear the facts when they clash with a happily imagined reality. It is, after all, a terrible thing to be the only person in town who can see what’s really happening. But I’ve gotten used to it.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Gone to Glory”

“Lou,” said Valya, “can we borrow one of your projectors?”

Lou was one of these people who seemed to enjoy bestowing favors. “Sure,” he said. “Did I hear something about moonriders?”

“At Ophiuchi.”

He lit up. “Are you serious?”

“Of course. There’s apparently something there.”

“Projectors.” He thought about it. “Follow me.” He led the way into a corridor, passed a few doors, and entered another VR chamber. “A few of our people have seen them.”

“So we heard.”

“You’ve got the feed?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all.” They grabbed seats while Valya tied into the system. “Go ahead, Bill,” she said. “Let’s see what we have.”

Bill adopted his professorial tone. “First images arrived three minutes ago,” he said. The room went dark, and the Ophiuchi sky appeared. A red star, a sensor image, was moving. Left to right, across the front of the chamber. It brightened as they watched.

Coming closer.

“It’s not responding to radio calls,” said Bill.

“Comet,” suggested MacAllister.

“It’s under power.”

“Is it one of ours?” asked Valya.

“Negative.”

MacAllister wasn’t buying it. “How do you know, Bill?” he asked.

“The electronic signature doesn’t match anything we have.” The object grew bigger. “Switching to the monitor’s onboard telescope.” The red glow went away, and they were looking at a black globe. “Mag two hundred,” said Bill.

The crosswise movement had stopped. But it continued to get larger. “It looks as if it’s coming right at us,” said Amy.

Valya nodded. “It’s closing on the monitor.”

“If that thing doesn’t belong to us,” demanded Lou, “what the hell is it?”

Question of the hour.

There had to be a rational explanation. “Can we try talking to it through the monitor?” MacAllister asked.

“The onboard AI’s been trying to say hello. Not getting an answer.”

“How about if we try it?” he persisted.

“Too much of a time lapse,” said Valya.

The object drifted in virtually nose to nose with the monitor. And stopped.

“Diameter of the globe,” said Bill, “is 61.7 meters. The monitor reports it is being probed.”

“I wish we could react to it in some way,” said Eric. “Wave a flag, do something.”

Amy was delighted. Overwhelmed. She raised both fists. “It’s scary.”

For a long time, no one else said anything. It felt almost as if the moonrider was in the chamber with them.

“So what do we do?” asked Eric. “Do we go back to Ophiuchi?”

Valya looked uncertain. “I doubt it would still be there when we showed up.”

“Still,” said Amy, “it’s why we’re out here. Shouldn’t we at least try?”

Eric nodded. Yes. Let’s go. Valya looked at Mac. “What do you think?”

“Let me ask a question first: If it’s still there when we arrive, would we be able to run it down?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “We don’t have a read on their acceleration capability. In any case, we don’t know that it would run from us.”

Or after us. There was a sobering thought. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find out what the damned thing is.”